Globalization Instructor Highlight: Dr. Stockdale on a Minor in Globalization

Thinking about adding a Minor in Globalization Studies? Learn about its impact from the developer of Globalization 1A03!

We sat down with Dr. Liam Stockdale to ask right from the source, how GLOBALZN 1A03 came to be, and why you should consider a minor in globalization!

What is your educational background, and how did you become involved with the IGHC?
I’ve got an Hons. BA in Political Science from McMaster (2007), an MA in International Relations from the Munk School of Global Affairs and the Department of Political Science at U of T (2008), and a Ph.D. in Political Science from McMaster (2013).

I have been directly involved with the IGHC since 2011, when I co-founded – along with my then-PhD supervisor Dr. Tony Porter and several other colleagues – the Globalization and Time Working Project. This initiative yielded several workshops and publications, including the edited volume Time, Globalization, and Human Experience as well as a special issue of the journal Globalizations. Then, after completing my Ph.D., I was fortunate to be appointed to a post-doctoral fellowship at the IGHC for the 2014-15 academic year, during which I completed work on my book, Taming an Uncertain Future.

What was the process of creating Globalization 1A03 like?
As part of my IGHC post-doctoral fellowship, I was tasked with preparing a proposal for a new BA in Globalization Studies program. The proposed program as a whole was ultimately deferred for financial reasons; but it was partly implemented in the form of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Globalization Studies, which required a core course. This is what became Globalization 1A03: Global Citizenship, which I developed and began teaching in January 2016 and have continued to teach ever since!

What do you enjoy most about teaching Globalization 1A03?
What I love about teaching this course with the IGHC is that it’s an interdisciplinary elective—which means that each term there are students in the class from nearly every faculty. I especially like that so many STEM and business students take the course, since it provides them with an approach to learning about the topics in question that, I think, differs in meaningful ways from what they encounter in most of their other classes.

I also love teaching first-year students, especially in the Fall term during what is literally their first few weeks on campus. I try to make my classroom representative of the kind of friendly and welcoming, yet also intellectually stimulating, environment that we aspire to at McMaster, so that I can help the university make a great first impression on our newest students. Oh, and one other benefit of teaching at the IGHC is that I get work with students from the MA program as my TAs—who are always the smartest and most interesting people you could hope to meet!

How does a minor in Globalization prepare students for their professional endeavours?
A major benefit of minoring in Globalization Studies is that it highlights your ability to, forgive the cliché, “think globally” about the various challenges societies face in the contemporary world. Not only is this valuable in and of itself, but it is vitally important for generating viable solutions, which is what many of our public-spirited students aspire to do in their subsequent professional endeavours, whatever they may be. To be a bit more specific about it, its explicitly interdisciplinary character means that a Minor in Globalization Studies conveys the substantial breadth and depth of your intellectual abilities, emphasizing your ability to think critically about a wide range of challenging ideas and topics while also synthesizing and communicating complex information in clear and incisive ways. These are precisely the sorts of “soft skills” that organizations of all types are always telling us they are looking for when they recruit new employees.